This is the first part of a two part project.

First listen: React to what you hear

This a translation project. You are translating musical ideas into prose.

For your first listen, I just want you to let yourself fall into this music without being influenced by what narrative the composer might have had in mind. The piece is three and a half minutes long. The louder the music the more you will be embraced by its sound.

Output

Take inspiration from this whatever you can – structural ideas, ideas about emotion, color, rhythmn, visual imagry, etc. There is a lot in this music. Write whatever comes to mind. This can be a single story or fragments of a story, which will make sense after you have listened to the music. Use this to strech your mind and challenge your wriitng skills.

The Tempo: Allegro furioso

The tempo is given as allegro furioso, furiously fast. Allegro begins at roughly 120 beats per minute. An allegro furioso is faster than 120. For composers, the speed of the beat is one of the core decisions around which pieces are written. Is there an analogue in prose? Could there be? What might an allegro furioso prose piece be like? What if the tempo were slow, adagio or grave? Is there a prose analogue? I don’t have the answer here. I think that in thinking one might find writing ideas by thinking about the difference between this super fast piece with flying notes and a piece with a slower tempo.

The Opening: Abrupt.

There is no build up to the beginning of this movment. Imnmwediately, like by six seconds, we are dropped into turmoil. Dropped into tension. Composers can convey tension with sound. This piece has several instances of sudden, dissonent, and screachy shounds. As an author, you usually “build up” to tension. Can you think of an analogue in writing to the kinds of sounds we hear in the opening, and in other parts of the music, as well.

I think it is helpful to clarify ones ideas by thinking in terms of comparisons and contrasts. Contrast this opening with openings to prose works you are familiar with. For example, remind yourself of the scene-setting opening to The Outsiders. Note how it establishes the sense of beginning. Similarly, the calming personable, “Call me Ishmael,” that opens Moby Dick also establishes a beginning. For me, the Moby Dick opening calls to mind a performer on stage in a spotlight. As the applause dies down and the hall silences, he introduces himself, “Call me Ishmael.” What you will get from the opening to this movement is the opposite of a calm exposition. How can one do this in prose?

Structure

As I mentioned, the striking opening around :06 is reprised roughly one minute in. It is almost immediately followed by a pause, a single pizzicato note, and another pause. I want you to think about the piccicato note. When you notice something as being structural, like what is going on around the pizzicato note, please think aboout how you might be able to use that. There is an expression about picking brains, like one might reply in answer to the question, h”How was the meeting with so-and-so , that “They picked my brain” or, “I picked their brain.” That is what I want you to do here. Take whatever inspires.

In prose, the analogue to the pizzicato might be a division established through a single word sandwiched betwen paragaphs that are themselves separated from the main text by double spacing.

Note changes in the the music before and after the pizzicato. When the music resumes it has a completely different sound – as if it were muffled. So, this pause and single note is without doubt an important structural marker in the music.

This piece is full of nearly impossible challenges for the prose writer. How would one write the contrast in tone one finds before and after the pizzicato? I don’t have the answer to that.

Drama: multiple voices

As the piece progresses, around 1:55, we are the midst of an intense interacton, or drama, between two voices. Whatever is going on, it is emotionally raw. A large increase in emotional intensity which is followed round 2:11 with a striking shift in tone. A calming down and leveling out. As this leveling out is now roughly a further one-third into the piece from the pizzicato, one might think of it, like the pizzicato note, as being part of a structure that gives form to this three and a half minute piece. It isn’t a simple flow from start to finish. As at this point your natural form seems to be the short short story, I want you to see how, through putting together short prose pieces that are somehow related, you could build something that is more complex out of short proses pieces, and even including flashes of prose, analogous to some of the flashes of sound you will encounter in this piece.

Be experimental

Take risks. Be experimental. If something in the music inspires a sentence, then the sentence is enough.

Part II

For Part II, I have put together links that offer more information about the Furies as well as links to other artistic treatments of this story, including a recreation of the music that will have accompanied the telling of this story in ancient Greece, incredibly, based on a sruving musical text. Knowing more about what the composer might have had in mind what you hear will be different when you listen. I think it will be easier to create a coherent narrative after you know more about who the furies are. But, for now, just interact to what you hear.